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Revolutionary Road

WITH the unemployment rate at 10.2 percent and job creation creeping along despite increased spending on infrastructure, we should look with new eyes at a resource we’ve failed to take full advantage of: the Interstate highway system.

Much of President Obama’s stimulus package has gone to maintaining our roads, and rightly so. But as we invest in the highways that accelerated suburban sprawl and deepened our addiction to oil, we should use the opportunity to invent new uses for the almost 47,000-mile long Interstate system.

Consider it a kind of adaptive reuse: the old foundry reborn as a luxury loft building, the abandoned industrial bakery transformed into a chic urban mall. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to see beyond the traffic and the exhaust fumes. But if we expand the highway system’s uses in anticipation of a time when we are no longer dependent on the internal combustion engine, we may also appreciate the beauty in its graceful overpasses, lofty bridges and complex cloverleaf interchanges.

The most obvious use for the Interstate’s corridors is rail transportation. If we are going to spend billions rehabbing the highways, shouldn’t we, at the same time, invest in adjacent rail lines like the 800-mile high-speed rail system voters approved last year in California

The corridors are also perfectly suited for the transportation of energy. Power generated from rural wind farms and solar plants could run through lines buried under the highways to big cities where electricity is needed. The plug-in hybrid vehicles that will someday use the highways could charge up from this grid. And when left idling, these cars would also be able to supply power back to the grid at times of peak demand, while their owners work or shop by the roadside.

Instead of continuing to write off the no man’s land beyond the highways — that sprawl of gas stations, motels and fast-food restaurants — we should look at this acreage as a resource. Cars and trucks will soon have to pollute less, and they will also make less noise. There’s no reason that this land can’t be transformed into urban hubs, places where people might actually want to live, work or shop, change trains or go for a stroll.